David Gerard wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
(re: [[John Seigenthaler Sr.]])
Any good editor _with enough time_ who looks at an
article
about a living person which makes claims as
transparently
outlandish as these will know to remove those
claims and
insist on a source. It would have taken 15 seconds
of
googling to see that the claims were in no way
supported by
any obvious source.
Newpages patrol typically doesn't take or have the
time to do
that. It's a firehose of slush-pile quality
information. It's
about a first cull.
It shouldn't be. Jimbo's point about the "failure mode" is absolutely right - at the moment we're letting in "a firehose of slush-pile quality information" which doesn't even meet basic standards (I'll come back to this point). Our "failure mode" right now is to let everything in and hope that someone improves the "slush-pile". What happens if they don't? We simply don't have enough time to make this happen.
The Seigenthaler article didn't pass _any_ basic
quality standards.
It passed *basic* ones, which is how it survived
Newpages
patrol. Basic quality standards for Newpages means
more or less
that's it's shaped enough like something that might
be a
Wikipedia article not to shoot on sight.
I don't know how you can argue that it met *any* standards other than that it was written in English. Let's consider what was wrong with it. It was an orphan article, with no wikilinks, no references, no formatting and hopelessly (actually maliciously) incorrect information. What was right with it? Ummm....
Note that in my original proposal I said that including references should be part of the basic criteria. I expressly didn't say that the article should be accurate in every regard.
There's an important point here - it's simply not feasible to fact-check everything that goes into Wikipedia and nobody should fool themselves that this can be done. But the point about inaccurate information is that much of the time, it's something that someone has misremembered, it may be speculative or, as in the Siegenthaler case, it may simply have been made up.
If the Siegenthaler article submitter had been required to reference his allegations about his subject, the article would probably never have been accepted into the main namespace in the first place. Insisting on referenced sources is the first and best line of defence against bad information.
What it would need is something like what someone
else mooted, a
biography patrol. Which is a damn fine idea, I think.
It might help with existing biographies, but it won't solve the problem for newly created ones and it won't do anything at all for all the new non-biographical articles (which is most of them). Your idea of a "prefilled" article template is a good one, and I think it should be implemented. But it won't make much difference if people are still free to create junk articles and we still rely on those articles being caught.
You said earlier in your post that "Newpages patrol typically doesn't take or have the time to [check articles]." This is true - we have too few patrollers and too little time. Our method of checking new pages is effectively equivalent to random sampling; we're dipping into the firehose to see if what's coming through it is any good. This might work for an automated production line, but it's fundamentally the wrong model for a setup where each and every one of the products is "hand-made". You have to do quality control on each article, not on a representative sample.
I think we have three variables here: the number of new articles, the number of patrollers and the time required to review each new article. We might be able to reduce the number of new articles a bit by requiring users to log in before creating them, but it doesn't seem to have made a great deal of difference so far. The number of patrollers is something we don't have any control over and it's never likely to keep pace with the demand anyway.
The only variable we *can* really change substantially is the time we have in which to review articles. That's where the change in "failure mode" comes in. Right now, we have literally no time at all to review articles, because as soon as they're published they're in the namespace, and they scroll off the Newpages list within minutes or hours. Putting them in a review queue would give us all the time we needed to review them.
It would also greatly reduce the attractiveness of submitting Siegenthaler-style hoaxes and "look Ma!"-type junk because such articles would have a very high chance of never getting into the public website in the first place. Right now we're getting a huge amount of similar junk because the submitters know that it'll be visible immediately. Take that away, and you take away a lot of the rationale for hoaxing/vandalising in the first place.
One other point. People are understandably getting jittery about biographies because that's a point of legal vulnerability. But that's missing the point: we just don't have a problem with bad biographies, we have a problem with a broken process that lets in all kinds of bad information, not just biographies. Jimbo's experiment in stopping anonymous editors from creating new articles won't stop that, any more than your proposal of patrolling biographies. The underlying process needs to be fixed, not just a particular category of user privileges or content.
- ChrisO
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Hello, How about making it so that new page patrollers stamp any biographical-looking page with an {{unchecked bio}} template? Then that becomes another round of article checking that can be done by whoever it is that carries out these repetitive tasks. By making the template sufficiently spammy and legalese ("This article has not been fact checked and may contain serious inaccuracies and even defamatory statements. The Wikimedia foundation explicitly disclaims all responsibility...") you could even kill two birds with one stone.
Steve
Chris Owen wrote (amongst others)
The only variable we *can* really change substantially is the time we have in which to review articles. That's where the change in "failure mode" comes in. Right now, we have literally no time at all to review articles, because as soon as they're published they're in the namespace, and they scroll off the Newpages list within minutes or hours. Putting them in a review queue would give us all the time we needed to review them.
One other point. People are understandably getting jittery about biographies because that's a point of legal vulnerability. But that's missing the point: we just don't have a problem with bad biographies, we have a problem with a broken process that lets in all kinds of bad information, not just biographies. Jimbo's experiment in stopping anonymous editors from creating new articles won't stop that, any more than your proposal of patrolling biographies. The underlying process needs to be fixed, not just a particular category of user privileges or content.
Am Montag, den 19.12.2005, 21:27 +0100 schrieb Steve Bennett:
Hello, How about making it so that new page patrollers stamp any biographical-looking page with an {{unchecked bio}} template? Then that becomes another round of article checking that can be done by whoever it is that carries out these repetitive tasks. By making the template sufficiently spammy and legalese ("This article has not been fact checked and may contain serious inaccuracies and even defamatory statements. The Wikimedia foundation explicitly disclaims all responsibility...") you could even kill two birds with one stone.
*cough* Tasks extension *cough*
Magnus (hopefully not getting the flu:-)
On 19/12/05, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
Hello, How about making it so that new page patrollers stamp any biographical-looking page with an {{unchecked bio}} template? Then that becomes another round of article checking that can be done by whoever it is that carries out these repetitive tasks. By making the template sufficiently spammy and legalese ("This article has not been fact checked and may contain serious inaccuracies and even defamatory statements. The Wikimedia foundation explicitly disclaims all responsibility...") you could even kill two birds with one stone.
And if we have a {{not a biography}} tag of some sort we can grab a list of things that don't have {{biography}} and {{unchecked biography}} and sort! And then we end up with a useful list of people, too. Anyone?
-- Abi